"Stupid French" and "What's the matter with bridges these days?"

Our trip from Porto to Amsterdam started at 2pm that Sunday and ended at 2am on Monday (technically Tuesday). It would have been terrible if we hadn't managed to get sleeping berths on the night train. That made all the difference in the world. We were doing fine on times and connections until we got to Paris' Gard du Nord station and sat on our rather expensive Thalys train for over an hour waiting to depart.

Apparently, someone had thrown their body under a train 2 stations away and that person's suicide was gumming up all the works. When the train conductor announced this news to us, we knew we'd never make the rest of our train connections. What's the matter with good, old fashioned bridges these days?

We finally made it to Bruxelles Midi station at 9:50pm, having missed our connection to Amsterdam. Fortunately for us, there was another Thalys train to Amsterdam that was delayed an hour forty minutes for the same suicide as ours so we ended up hopping it. The desk wasn't able to get us reservations for the train because it was no longer in the system so we boarded the train with fingers crossed hoping we wouldn't get kicked off.

Our stars were all in alignment that train trip because not only did the female train manager ignore our presence entirely (and possibly on purpose because she just didn't want to know), but we had met the two cute train conductresses while waiting for the train to show at the station the one serving our carriage took extra good care of our refreshment needs. The train got us into Amsterdam Centraal at 12:45pm where we waited outside in our first taste of fall weather on our trip so far for a good hour before catching the night bus to our hostel which cost us the ridiculous price of 7 Euros.

Finally, at 2am, we checked into our hostel only to discover that the two free dorm beds in our dorm room looked used and were covered in our dormmates' stuff. Also, the room reeked of weed smoke and we knew smoking wasn't allowed in the rooms. When we asked the manager to take care of it for us, he responded by waking up our dormmates to bawl them out loudly and then told us we could go right in. Not wanting to be strangled in the night by people who hated us from the get go thanks to the manager, we insisted on another room. The room full of girls that we ended up in was not only smoke free and clean, but no one was snoring! What a treat.

We sent our half day in Amsterdam by walking the city from Leidsplassen back to the Centraal train station laden with groceries obtained from the Lidl near the Vondelpark. Then we got our luggage out of storage and hopped a local train to Utrecht and then a commuter train from there to Zaltbummel, the nearest station to the hostel we chose. The hostel manager, Michael, picked us up in an open air, WWII-era jeep and we shivered our way to the hostel. The hostel was a house with private rooms upstairs and a dining room, movie room, kitchen, enclosed patio room with TV and restroom facilities. Attached, there was a small barn housing a pig, goat and several unnamed bunnies.

This is where we will spend as long as the next full week enjoying the peace and quiet of the Dutch countryside while relaxing, reading and generally doing nothing. It will be a nice segue into our visit to my host family, the Mosveens, in Norway and then our final 2 weeks in Ireland with Amir's Irish clan.